Al Gore and the UN panel on climate change will share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and join the list of other outstanding winners. However, given his idea of peace and his goal in founding the Peace Prize, Nobel may have come to regret that he entrusted the Norwegian parliament with awarding it.

The five member Nobel Committee might have had a very difficult task in choosing the winner. But Nobel made their job easy with a precise description in his 1895 testament of his vision of peace and the kind of peace work he wished to stimulate and give financial support.

Nothing is wrong with awarding the prize to Al Gore; efforts to rescue the environment clearly have a peace aspect. Climate change is undoubtedly a threat to international security and may cause great harm, untold suffering, violence, and even war itself. But there are many prizes for environmental work.

Indeed, if the committee really had wished to help rescue the environment, which is devastated by war and militarism, they would have stuck more closely to the anti-militaristic core of Nobel's vision of peace.

Nobel’s views

Alfred Nobel, who used his immense fortune to establish the world’s five most prestigious prizes, believed that science and medicine would work wonders for mankind and even that science would help end all wars. He assumed that “the day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilised nations will recoil from war and discharge their troops.”

This has not happened. For over two generations now we have been building capabilities which can obliterate not only armies but the entire planet many times over, and yet we are unable to break the vicious cycles that sustain huge military sectors in all societies.

It is not loyal to Nobel’s testament to practice a very general concept of peace, awarding the Peace Prize to “those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. Even if those words are also found in Nobel’s will, there is no doubt that his intention with the prize was to pursue a more fundamental change: a world without militarism and wars.

For the Peace Prize to uphold its character and prestige, several of the later prizes will have to be seen as one-off reminders of the many types of activities that can contribute to peace. The prizes awarded to Wanghari Maathai (2004) and Mohammad Yunus (2006) have clearly been in the periphery of, if not outside, Nobel’s vision.

He did not intend to establish a prize for environment or economy, but wished to “abolish or reduce standing armies” and to promote the “holding and promotion of peace congresses”. Nobel also used a third criterion, “fraternity among nations”, which also points to orderly and civil relations between states, and the rule of law on the international level – and an end to the military anarchy of today's “security” politics.

Norway connection

While the other Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Nobel, for reasons unknown, tasked the Norwegian Parliament with awarding the Peace Prize. In the first decades of the prize, one hundred years ago, the committee members were either from the peace movement or were politicians close to it.

This has changed in later years, where parliament can be suspected of using seats on the prestigious committee as a reward to party colleagues for long service.

To avoid any such suspicion, parliament should select persons for the committee who are familiar with international affairs and peace politics, and who are also able to understand and be loyal to Alfred Nobel's vision.Both politicians and academics have performed admirably on the committee, but most Norwegian politicians have spent their lives serving ideas very far from Nobel’s vision and are hardly the best suited to be executors of his testament.

– IPS
(The writer is a former Vice President of the International Peace Bureau.)