I don’t know who serves on the committee that awards Nobel Prizes, but I can’t help thinking they’re not very different from the guys on committees in civic organizations all over the planet, the do-gooders who get together for lunch one Wednesday a month to gossip and tell faintly bawdy stories and, Oh yeah, does anybody on the Peace subcommittee have any thoughts about who gets this year’s prize?
I’ve been on committees, and there’s usually somebody who became infected by a big insight on the way over. In the case of the Peace Prize subcommittee, the insight was probably something along the lines of, “You know, I’ve been thinking. There hasn’t been a war in Europe for a long time. We should encourage that kind of behavior. What if we give the Peace Prize to the whole continent?”
Then somebody would have pointed out that, “Well, there was that affair in Bosnia.”
“The European Union, then. Bosnia isn’t part of the EU. There haven’t been any wars in the European Union.”
“But there’s only been a European Union for 19 years. There’s no way it could have kept the peace all the way back to 1945.”
“Wasn’t there something before that? Some kind of iron and coal deal between France and Germany in the Fifties? Maybe that’s the reason we haven’t had a war.”
“It was the European Coal and Steel Community.”
“The arms manufacturers, then. Maybe we could give the . . .”
“You’re telling us we should give the prize to an arms manufacturer?”
“Why not an arms manufacturer? Alfred Nobel made his fortune selling dynamite.”
“Now you’re saying Alfred Nobel was an arms manufacturer?”
“Just saying.”
“An arms manufacturer would be a bold stroke, I’ll give you that.”
“We should try something new this time around. I don’t think we’ve given the prize to arms manufacturers before. Here, let me check the list. Krupps is available. Nobody’s awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Krupps of Essen.”
“You think the rest of the world would stand for it?”
“I think the rest of the world stood and applauded when we gave the prize to Barack Obama for . . . does anybody remember what we gave it to President Obama for?”
“For not being George Bush?”
“And for having an African father.”
“But Krupps of Essen? That’s a different kettle of pickled herring. Surely . . .
“That’s the beauty of the thing. We could give it to the European Union and not have to say anything about Krupps.”
And that was that. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU was just the ticket to encourage Europeans to keep on not murdering each other. And the cent-or-two in prize money they all got out of the deal would create real, tangible benefits for good behavior.
Now, I don’t want to come down too hard on guys who donate their time to good causes, but the whole process seems a bit slapdash to me. I mean, there’s no denying the subcommittee was onto something. A clam would have known that entire European countries going 67 years without invading one another is not only a big deal, it’s a big, historically unprecedented deal that hadn’t happened on the continent since, well, since before the invention of invading. That kind of behavior deserves recognition, and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is just about as recognized as anybody gets in this life. I just think the subcommittee’s aim was bad when they picked the EU to honor.
It was the same sloppy thinking that led them to look at the results of the 2008 American elections and decide to encourage our good behavior. Then, instead picking the American voters, or the constitutional system that allowed us to dump Jim Crow and George W. both, the subcommittee fixated on the beneficiary and handed the prize to President Obama.
As worthy as their intentions were, it doesn’t take much to know that it wasn’t the EU that kept Europe out of war. It wasn’t Europeans at all. If peace had been up to Europeans the Eiffel Tower would have been melted down for cannon years ago.
It was us who kept them from exterminating each other. For two-thirds of a century Italy hasn’t attacked Austria. Spain hasn’t gone to war against Holland. Greece hasn’t had a final smackdown with Turkey, and none of the other possible permutations of the way European governments find to kill each others’ citizens have taken place because we wouldn’t let them. And for a really good reason.
It wasn’t just to keep the Reds out that we didn’t bring home all of our troops after the Second World War. Having already sent two generations of Americans to die saving Europeans from each other, we didn’t want to do it a third time and we stayed over there and sat on them and made sure they didn’t start shooting again. For decades we even drafted otherwise decent young men and forced them to go to Europe to do the sitting. If our guys had wound up in the Balkans after WWII, Bosnia wouldn’t have gone to war, either.
Had the members of the Nobel subcommittee thought it through, they would have given this year’s Peace Prize to the ones who deserved it . . . not to the beneficiaries of the peace Europeans enjoy, but to those responsible for the peace: the American military. Besides, America doesn’t have anywhere near as many soldiers as they have people in the EU and the prize money would have gone a lot farther.
