The Undistinguished History of the Nobel Peace Prize

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama has provoked a strange storm of controversy. I say strange because the protagonists in the debate--the advocates, ambivalents, and antagonists of President Obama's unexpected award--seem to read too much into the award. As shown by their partisan passions they seem, despite their apparent disagreement, to invest the prize with a measure of worldly greatness that is simply untenable.

The prize has always been political, driven by political calculations to make political statements, sometimes progressive, often quite reactionary. It has tended, at its best, to be an aspirational prize, given as much to celebrate achievements as to influence events, at worst as a desperate or even cynical reward for war leaders who peacefully shake their blood-soaked hands for the history books. More often than not, it is an idiosyncratic prize, awarded to towering moral giants and political dwarfs, peacemakers and warmongers, truly inspiring individuals and deeply flawed institutions, worthy struggles and forgettable causes.

Above all, we read too much when we fail to put the peace prize into the context of the Nobel Prizes as a whole, which remain accolades to Eurocentric self-congratulation. One of the reasons the Peace Prize and to a lesser extent the Nobel Prize for Literature attract public interest is that they occasionally break the mold by anointing the natives from the other side of the global color line. That nobody seems to remember or gets too exercised by who gets the other Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine established by Alfred Nobel himself, and for Ecconomics established in 1968 by the Swedish Central Bank, is both a tribute to our collective acquiesence to the objectivist claims of science and our enduring attachment to cultural and civilizational identities.      

Following yesterday's announcement, the number of Nobel Peace prizes that have been awarded individually and jointly since 1901 total 119. In terms of geographical distribution, they have gone to 16 European countries, 11 Asian countries, 4 African countries, and 5 countries in North and South America. A more illuminating picture emerges when the prizes are broken down by nationality. The United States leads with 24, followed by Britain with 15, Switzerland 11, France 9, then come Belgium, Sweden,  and South Africa with four each, and Austria and Israel with three each. The rest have two each (7 countries) or one each (18 countries).

It is equally instructive to note the temporal dimensions. The first country to win the prize from the global South was Argentina in 1936. Nearly three decades elapsed before it was South Africa's turn. It is only in the last thirty years that the peace prize has been seen as increasingly worthy of recipients from the global South. As much in the world political economy, this travesty reflects the unequal international division and distribution of power.

It is indeed a terrible joke that at the height of European colonialism, a system which encapsulated a barbarous assault on freedom, justice and peace for hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia  to satify the imperial  and racist fantasies of Europe, not a single African or Asian, not a Mahatma Gandhi or a Kwame Nkrumah, was honored while European politicians and do-gooders raked the accolades from this dubious paean to global peace.

More often than not, the prize has gone to political leaders--those venerable presidents, prime ministers, secretaries of state--whose policies have caused so much grief and sorrow to millions of people around the world. To maintain the fiction of the prize's universal desirability, as is common in most exclusionary and elitist institutions and reward systems, the rare true activists of global peace are occasionally recognized and celebrated.       

Altogether, 97 individuals and 22 to institutions have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Seventy-six of the individual recipients have been white including one white African, former apartheid South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk, 10 Asians, 10 people of African descent, and 1 person of native American descent. Of the ten people of African descent, three have been African Americans including, now, President Obama, the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1964, and Ralph Bunche in 1950.

Ralph Bunche, the African American scholar and diplomat, was in fact the first person of color to receive the prize for his work as the UN's chief mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1947-1949.  Ten years later another person of color was selected, Chief Albert Luthuli, the president of the African National Congress then escalating its struggle against apartheid as the winds of independence were blowing across the continent. He was the first African to be awarded the prize.

The first Asian, Le Duc Tho, the Vietnamese revolutionary leader, was not chosen until as late as 1973, jointly with Henry Kissinger, but he turned it down, the only person ever to do so. Thus the first Asian to actually receive the prize was the Japanese premier, Eisaku Sato, who shared it with the Irish government minister and internationalist, Sean MacBride, in 1974. It is quite instructive that a disproportionate number of African and Asian recipients of the prize have shared it with whites or international organizations.

Examples include the Egyptian President, Anwar Al-Sadat, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, who were jointly awarded the prize in 1978; Nelson Mandela and de Klerk in 1993, and Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Simon Peres in 1995. As for sharing the prize jointly with intrenational organizations, recent examples include the UN and its Secretary General, Kofi Anan of Ghana in 2001, and the International Atomic Agency and its Director General Mohamed Mustafa ElBaradei of Egypt in 2005. Occasionally, the prize has been shared with local institutions as was the case of  the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, in 2006.

Incidentally, besides the Grameen Bank, there are no other institutions founded in Africa, Asia, or Latin America that have ever won the prize. Before the Second World War, the prize was a monopoly of European institutions some of which nobody remembers, except for the Red Cross, which has received the prize a record four times. Since then the prize has predominantly gone to the UN or its agencies, and an assortment of western NGOs including Amnesty International (1977), International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985) based in Somerville, Massachusetts, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (1995), founded in Pugwash, Nova Scotia in Canada in 1955 which has offices in Rome, London, Geneva and Washington, DC, and Medicins Sans Frontieres (1999).   

It is equally revealing that not only have the bulk of the prizes gone to people of European descent, they have tended to go to people of African and Asian descent in theaters of conflict involving European settlers or in which Euroamerica is deeply implicated or has strategic interests. This might explain why the United States and South Africa have received six, three each, of the ten prizes that have gone to peoples of African descent. Surely, the pan-African world has produced indefatigable fighters for peace and human rights beyond these two countries.

The Nobel Peace prizes have not simply been a preserve of whites, but of white men and men in general. Only eleven women have ever won the prize, eight of them white beginning with Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian novelist and pacifist in 1911 and followed by Jane Adams, an American social and peace activist, in 1931. Incredibly, it was not until sixty years later, in 1991, that the first female of color received this prize, the irrepressible Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. The first, and so far, only African descended woman to win the prize had to wait for another 13 years, Kenya's Wangari Maathai, for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.

Clearly, the history of the Nobel Peace Prize is quite undistinguished. But it is slightly better than that of the other Nobel Prizes. Taking the Nobel prizes as a whole, by mid-2008, about 800 prizes had been awarded to individuals and nearly two dozen organizations in 61 countries. The top dozen countries were the United States (318), Britain (115), Germany (103), France (57), Sweden (28), Switzerland (25), Russia (23), Austria (20), Italy (18), Canada (18), Netherlands (18), and Japan (16). Note the list includes only one Asian country and none from Africa or Latin America.

Something is surely wrong when Sweden, the homeland of Alfred Nobel, has more Nobel Prize winners than all the Asian countries that have ever won the prize combined excluding Japan and Israel (India-10, China-5, Bangladesh-2, East Timor 2, Iran-2, Azerbaijan-1, Myanmar 1, Pakistan-1, Palestine 1, South Korea-1, and Vietnam-1). The case of India is deceptive in so far as many of the winners are Indian-born but citizens or long-term residents of Western Europe and North America.

Africa's case is even more troubling. The entire continent has produced 18 Nobel Prize winners, half of who are South African or South African born but now reside in the global North. Eight of the prizes are for peace, five for literature including the Algerian-born Albert Camus who received the prize in 1957, one each for physics for another Algerian born scientist and for chemistry for an Egyptian born scientist, and three for physiology or medicine all claimed by white South Africans.      

Given this unsavory history, it would not be farfetched to argue that the Peace Prizes, and the Nobel Prizes in general, are part of the ideological arsenal of maintaining, reproducing, and normalizing international, institutional, and intellectual inequalities. No wonder, I was not too exercised when I heard the news that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. I was even less enamored by the passionate punditry in the American media, the predictable rightwing critics of the president who endlessly bloviate against him and oppose everything he does or stands for. These are the same people who celebrated the president's apparent ‘rejection' last week by the International Olympic Committee and several months ago when an unexceptional university, Arizona State University, refused to give him an honorary degree because ‘his body of work was yet to come' when far less renowned people routinely scoop such decorative degrees.

For the president's diehard supporters who believe he is a transformational leader, they see the prize as one more confirmation of their messianic faith in him. Those in the middle either worry that the prize will compromise him politically by showing that foreigners love him, or hope he will earn the prize by doing good. This is to invest too much power in the meaning and impact of the Nobel Peace prizes. Instead of debating President Obama's worthiness or unworthiness for the prize (by the uninspiring record of the prize he is no more or less deserving than the uneven crew who have received it before him), we need to be questioning the value of such provincial Euroamerican prizes that aspire to be arbitrators and certifiers of global excellence without global inclusivity.

First written October 10, 2009