The Nobel Peace Prize has been controversial, right from the beginning. When was the beginning? The Nobel prizes, including the peace prize, were first issued in 1901. Today, I have a piece on the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize: here. In this post, I would like to recap a little history.
That first peace prize, in 1901, was controversial for several reasons. To begin with, the prize was split between two people. The testator, Alfred Nobel, had said nothing about that. In fact, he said “person” — one person — not “persons.”
Second, the prize went to two men of advanced age and at the end of their careers. Hadn’t the testator meant to fund people who needed the support to further their labors? And weren’t the prizes meant to honor work done “during the preceding year,” not over a lifetime? Yes and yes.
But the main reason the 1901 prize was controversial had to do with the work of one of the honorees. More about him in a moment.
The noncontroversial honoree — relatively noncontroversial — was Frédéric Passy, the grand old man of the French peace movement, and the European peace movement. He was an economist, a free-marketeer, a follower of Bastiat and Cobden. He believed that free trade and peace went hand in hand. He thought that economic freedom in general was peace-tending.
Such people, such thinkers, were a significant part of the peace movement.
The other laureate was Henry Dunant, the Swiss humanitarian, who had founded the Red Cross. Now, why was nice Monsieur Dunant so controversial? Who can argue with the Red Cross? The problem was, he was a humanitarian, not a peacemaker, or pacifist. He had written laws of war: how to treat the wounded, how to treat prisoners. Critics said that this was “humanizing war,” putting a bandage over it. Dunant and his confrères were making war more palatable and less horrible to the public. Wouldn’t that make war likelier?
You were supposed to abolish war, not improve its laws! What was the Nobel committee thinking? One critic said that making war better was like lowering the temperature when you were boiling a man in oil.
Anyway, the five souls of the Norwegian Nobel Committee have had to wrestle with the question “What is peace?” for over 120 years now. It is a slippery question. As I say in my piece today, peace is “more than the absence of war” — but “it is not war either.” Those interested in the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, and its multifarious issues and personalities, can consult my book Peace, They Say.
The 1901 prize was split between two people. The 2022 prize is split between three. (Eventually, the rules governing the Nobel prizes said that a prize could go to three people, and no more.) Did I say “people”? Organizations, as well as persons, can win the peace prize. A great many have.
This year, the recipients are one individual and two organizations. The individual is Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian democracy activist and political prisoner. (If you’re a democracy activist in Belarus, you’re a political prisoner, too.) One organization is Memorial, from Russia. The other is the Center for Civil Liberties, in Ukraine.
Is this more a freedom prize than a peace prize? That is an interesting question, and one of the themes of my piece today. They often blend, peace and freedom. And often you have to fight for freedom — and peace, for that matter, paradoxical as it may sound.
I once saw a graffito, scrawled under a bridge in Salzburg: “Fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity.” Is it? There is a debate to be had.
A question for you — another one: Is China at peace? The answer is yes, I suppose. But if you’re a Uyghur, you might well say, “This is peace?”
There have been thousands of books on the subject we are talking about, and I’m jotting a blogpost. I will finish up for now, but the subject is interesting, vexing. It interested and vexed people thousands of years ago, and will interest and vex them thousands of years from now, provided we’re still ticking.