Oslo Syndrome
TERZIAN, PHILIP
Oslo Syndrome The Nobel Peace Prize ain’t what it used to be BY PHILIP TERZIAN Visit the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, and cadets will show you the statue of General George C....
...Up to a point, FT...
...The award, which the former vicepresident shares with the United Nations’ body of climate experts, follows speculation about a Gore presidential bid...
...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...
...But what is the promotion of peace, anyway...
...To be sure, hostility toward the United States does not always govern the choices of the Nobel Committee...
...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...
...Is it the pronouncement of words and the striking of attitudes, or the action that guarantees freedom against tyranny...
...Committee of the Red Cross (1944 and 1963), U.N...
...Which brings us to the ambiguity of the Nobel Peace Prize itself...
...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...
...They do this partly because Marshall is VMI’s most illustrious graduate, but largely because the prize, when Marshall won it, carried with it a significance and prestige that no longer obtains...
...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...
...Certainly, it is right and proper to recognize and reward humanitarians, and people who resist oppression at cost to themselves...
...Secretary of State Marshall was awarded the prize for his eponymous plan which assisted the postwar European recovery...
...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 orgaPhilip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...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 confi ned to one phase of U.S...
...The problem is that the Nobel Peace Prize, endowed by the consciencestricken inventor of dynamite, has always had a slightly ambiguous quality about it—unlike, say, the prizes in physics or medicine, even literature...
...It may be diffi cult to comprehend what, exactly, the committee was saying here, but the fact that 1990 was the fi rst year in which it felt obliged to furnish a citation suggests that, even in Oslo, the exclusion of Ronald Reagan required an explanation...
...efforts against Communist insurgencies in Central America...
...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) fi ctitious autobiography...
...The 1992 prize to Guatemala’s Rigoberta Mench...
...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...
...presidential politics...
...This was painfully obvious last week, when Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.—as the Nobel committee punctiliously identifi es him—was awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, in conjunction with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...
...But, as if we didn’t already know, the Nobel Peace Prize ain’t what it used to be...
...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...
...Gore could still change his mind, of course, and global warming might be mentioned at one of those televised debates...
...The 1987 award to Costa Rica’s president Oscar Arias S?nchez was an evident endorsement of the now-forgotten Arias Plan to thwart U.S...
...Oslo Syndrome The Nobel Peace Prize ain’t what it used to be BY PHILIP TERZIAN Visit the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, and cadets will show you the statue of General George C. Marshall ’01 on the edge of the parade ground, and add proudly that Marshall was (and remains) the only soldier ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1953...
...But while it is impossible to fi nd a modern laureate who could, in any reasonable way, be identifi ed with American foreign policy, it is easy to fi nd critics and adversaries...
...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...
...This includes American winners—Jody Williams (1997) of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines—and even onetime U.S...
...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 profi le of Alfred Nobel...
...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...
...High Commissioner for Refugees (1954 and 1981), Doctors Without Borders (1999...
...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...
...Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for his work on climate change is likely to place the issue at the forefront of political debate in the US as the country moves into its presidential election season...
...offi cials, such as Al Gore and Jimmy Carter (2002), whose public opposition to George W. Bush seems to have been decisive in Oslo...
...In the past few decades, however, the Nobel Peace Prize has developed a certain political edge...
...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...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 7
