Ever wondered how the Nobel peace prize came to be..this article gives but a glimpse into its history.. The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901-2000 by Geir Lundestad* Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, 1990 - This article is intended to serve as a basic survey of the history of the Nobel Peace Prize during its first 100 years. Since all the 107 Laureates selected from 1901 to 2000 are to be mentioned, the emphasis will be on facts and names. At the same time, however, I shall try to deal with two central questions about the Nobel Peace Prize. First, why does the Peace Prize have the prestige it actually has? Second, what explains the nature of the historical record the Norwegian Nobel Committee has established over these 100 years? There are more than 300 peace prizes in the world. None is in any way as well known and as highly respected as the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oxford Dictionary of Twentieth Century World History, to cite just one example, states that the Nobel Peace Prize is The worlds most prestigious prize awarded for the preservation of peace. Personally, I think there are many reasons for this prestige: the long history of the Peace Prize; the fact that it belongs to a family of prizes, i.e. the Nobel family, where all the family members benefit from the relationship; the growing political independence of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; the monetary value of the prize, particularly in the early and in the most recent years of its history. In this context, however, I am going to concentrate on the historical record of the Nobel Peace Prize. In my opinion, the prize would never have enjoyed the kind of position it has today had it not been for the decent, even highly respectable, record the Norwegian Nobel Committee has established in its selections over these 100 years. One important element of this record has been the committees broad definition of peace, enough to take in virtually any relevant field of peace work. On the second point, the selections of the Norwegian Nobel Committee reflected the insights primarily of the committee members and secondarily of its secretaries and advisors. But, on a deeper level, they also generally reflected Norwegian definitions of the broader, Western values of an idealist, the often slightly left-of-center kind, but rarely so far left that the choices were not acceptable to Western liberal-internationalist opinion in general. The Norwegian government did not determine the choices of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but these choices reflected the same mixture of idealism and realism that characterized Norwegian, and Scandinavian, foreign policy in general. As we shall see, some of the most controversial choices occurred when the Norwegian Nobel Committee suddenly awarded prizes to rather hard-line realist politicians. Nobels Will and the Peace Prize When Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896, it was discovered that he had left a will, dated November 27, 1895, according to which most of his vast wealth was to be used for five prizes, including one for peace. The prize for peace was to be awarded to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses. The prize was to be awarded by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. Nobel left no explanation as to why the prize for peace was to be awarded by a Norwegian committee while the other four prizes were to be handled by Swedish committees. On this point, therefore, we are dealing only with educated inferences. These are some of the most likely ones: Nobel, who lived most of his life abroad and who wrote his will at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, may have been influenced by the fact that, until 1905, Norway was in union with Sweden. Since the scientific prizes were to be awarded by the most competent, i.e. Swedish, committees at least the remaining prize for peace ought to be awarded by a Norwegian committee. Nobel may have been aware of the strong interest of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament) in the peaceful solution of international disputes in the 1890s. He might have in fact, considered Norway a more peace-oriented and more democratic country than Sweden. Finally, Nobel may have been influenced by his admiration for Norwegian fiction, particularly by the author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who was a well-known peace activist in the 1890s. Or it may have been a combination of all these factors. While there was a great deal of controversy surrounding Nobels will in Sweden and that of the role of the designated prize-awarding institutions, certainly including the fact that the rebellious Norwegians were to award the Peace Prize, the Norwegian Storting quickly accepted its role as awarder of the Nobel Peace Prize. On April 26, 1897, a month after it had received formal notification from the executors of the will, the Storting voted to accept the responsibility, more than a year before the designated Swedish bodies took similar action. It was to take three years of various legal actions before the first Nobel Prizes could actually be awarded.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 05:42:54 +0000
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