The Case For Obama’s Nobel Prize
Print. January 6th, 2010THE ANNOUNCEMENT last Friday that president Barack Obama had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize elicited unease from political allies in the US as well as scorn from predictable quarters.
Some liberals worried that such a surprising accolade could ultimately weigh negatively upon a president still grappling with a host of domestic concerns. Over half a million new jobless claims were filed in the US in the last week in September, and it is hard to imagine many of the claimants popping champagne corks upon hearing the news. Others on the left could not resist satirising Obama’s apparently limitless “rock star” appeal. Liberal commentator Michael Kinsley suggested Obama must now be considered a shoo-in for an Oscar.
Despite these unusual voices among the chorus of concern, and despite the sheer vitriol of the reaction from the American right – radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh insisted Obama’s overseas popularity stemmed from “trashing his own country” – perhaps the most perplexing criticism came from one of Ireland’s Nobel peace laureates.
Mairéad Corrigan-Maguire, who won in 1976 along with Betty Williams for her involvement in the North’s Peace People organisation, was “very sad” to hear of Obama’s victory. “The Nobel committee is not meeting the conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will because he stipulated that the award is to be given to people who end militarism and war and are for disarmament,” she said.
As Maguire should know, the committee has a tradition of selecting winners as much as an act of encouragement towards their goal as a celebration of the miles already travelled. Even some of the most revered peace laureates of the modern era were anointed at a time when their aspirations were unfulfilled, including South African bishop Desmond Tutu, Iranian women’s rights activist Shirin Ebadi and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As for Nobel’s will, while the Swedish scientist did encourage giving awards to people involved in “the abolition or reduction of standing armies”, the first qualification he laid down for those who would be awarded a prize was that they should “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations”.
Those words prove that selecting Obama to be not a defensible decision but the right one. Think of Obama’s achievements to date: setting in motion a US withdrawal from Iraq; renewing his nation’s focus on matters that demand international co-operation, including climate change and nuclear non-proliferation, and the tentative but encouraging advances that have come due to his emphasis on negotiation rather than sabre-rattling with adversaries like Iran.
Add to this the concerted push to reinvigorate the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the respectful but candid speeches delivered to audiences in the Middle East and Africa and it becomes hard to argue with the Nobel committee’s assertion that “Obama has, as president, created a new climate in international politics”.
These factors may have clinched the prize for Obama, but he evidently vaulted into contention much earlier. His detractors have pointed out that nominations for the award closed on February 1st, by which time the new president had been in office less than two weeks.
Again, they miss the point. By that stage, Obama had outlawed the use of torture by US forces, banned the use of secret prisons overseas and announced his plan to close Guantánamo Bay.
Lest we forget, he had achieved something of enormous significance even before making those moves: He got elected. The victory of a young, smart, internationalist Democrat – who thereby became his nation’s first African-American president – in and of itself nudged the political world into a different era.
Symbolic and substantive change are more intimately intertwined than Obama’s critics have acknowledged. His election and early months in power represent the kind of nascent emergence from darkness that the committee has celebrated in other nations. They were right to honour it in America’s case too.
First published in The Irish Times, October 12, 2009