Conflicted Little Minds, After All

Spectacularly small-minded is the impression that comes across with the revelation that a triumvirate of Nobel Peace Prize laureates have taken it upon their august selves to contest the awarding of this year's prize to the European Union.  Not that the decision by the Nobel Committee didn't come with its due share of criticism for any number of sources.

One imagines that the three Nobel laureates, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire and Adolfo Perez Esquivel stewed over their high dudgeon long enough to finally write to the Nobel Foundation to demand a retraction of at least the prize money attending the award, valued at $1.2 million.  In their measured, exalted opinion, the funding should be withheld this year.

Not, however, for 2009's granting of that same prize to then-newly-elected President Barack Obama; thin gruel for consideration, based entirely on wild expectations that this biracial man who had attained the highest political post of the most powerful country on Earth could deliver the Globe from the boiling cauldron of actual and threatened war situations.

Nor either for the absurd spectacle of the 1994 tri-granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East".  While there was sincerity on the part of Messrs. Peres and Rabin in their passion to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Chairman Arafat's mendacious efforts to appear to lend himself to the effort marked him as a poseur.

There is some sanity to the perceived madness of the Nobel Committee's choice of the European Union, however.  In recognizing the utility and real value of a grand vision of allied countries famous for their incapacity to view one another without animosity causing historical wars through the ages, directing their energies and aspirations instead to a combined future of prosperity and neighbourliness.

The European flag flies in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg October 12, 2012. REUTERS photo

It ill behooves the illustrious trio to distinguish their disgruntlement at the naming of the European Union for this year's selection on the basis of their contention that the European Union "clearly is not one of 'the champions of peace' Alfred Nobel had in mind" with the creation of his famed Nobel prizes, as they stated loftily in an open letter to the Nobel Foundation.

"We ask the board of the foundation to clarify that it cannot and will not pay the prize from its funds", insisted the three.  Bishop Tutu won the prize in 1984 for his struggle against apartheid in his native South Africa, Mairead Maguire for seeking a peaceful resolution to Northern Ireland's 'troubles' in 1976, while in 1980 Adolfo Perez Esquivel was similarly honoured for advancing human rights in Argentina.

While the work of this trio was admittedly admirable, their three countries of origin in which they performed their peaceful and peace-loving work aiding humanitarian progress, did not totally result in a full amelioration of all that ailed their native countries, for human nature always prevails to demonstrate time and again how fragile justice and decency is. And in those particular countries human nature does not demonstrate its finest attributes.

Europe in general, on the other hand, has benefited enormously through the brilliant plan to build a common purpose that would benefit all its members equally, removing the impetus for jealousy and territorial advantage, with the stronger economies working to favour the weaker ones.  By opening closed borders and inviting people to move freely and engage one another, breaking down the barriers of hostility and suspicion, everyone gained.

Europe, as a result, is a far more humane and open consortium of allied countries, an effect that far outdistances the progress made through the efforts of the other three laureates who stand together in a unity of criticism of what others have achieved.  Their conjoined stance denigrating the achievements of the European Union and denouncing the choice of the Norwegian Nobel Committee does not distinguish them positively.

As for the European Union, basking in the pleasure of recognition for having brought over half a century of peace to a continent riven by two world wars and an earlier succession of bitterly violent struggles, their decision to donate the funding now bitterly contested by the three laureates to children affected by war and conflicts, distinguishes them further in the most positive of ways.