An Award for the Future

A vote of encouragement rather than vote based on results. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama has upset those who have never gotten over the victory of such a different man.

Giving the prize to Obama is not without merit, but it is also not without flaw. It is rewarding his good intentions, but is ignoring the lack of concrete results achieved over the few months of his presidency. It is, in a word, a gamble.

This is not the first time, nor the most controversial, that this Nobel Peace Prize – awarded by a group of Norwegian judges different from those of the Swedish Academy – has been given for a work in progress or for debatable successes. When Lech Walesa, who yesterday was ungenerously among Obama’s critics, won it in 1983, Solidarnosc’s war against the Polish regime was far from its peaceful resolution, as rumors of a Soviet invasion were spreading. And the first American president who received it, Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, had recently returned from a colonial war that took Cuba away from Spain; he sent bands of volunteers and cowboys to the attack the enemy hills.

That Obama, as a person, was chosen is not controversial. Many more before him are much more controversial; for instance Arafat, Le Duc Tho, Kissinger, and Mohamed El Baradei have left more doubts than enthusiasm. The news is that the prize was awarded based on intentions, not actions, and that a head of state won the prize so early in his term. A hazard, a bet at the very beginning of the match.

Barack Obama’s merit, the characteristic that created unanimity of judgment among the judges, is seen again as non-Bush, non-Coca Cola, more like a drink that wanted to compete with the popular brand. He is the one who sees war, and makes war, as the last resort, and not as an a priori ideological choice. At least from the European point of view – a little less in America, where the electoral infatuation inevitably got cold – Obama is still reaping the benefits of Bush’s widespread unpopularity in the world.

It looked like a paradox that he was chosen as a symbol of peace when he may decide, reluctantly, to send another 40,000 soldiers to fight in Afghanistan like the generals have asked him. But the Nobel Peace Prize was never awarded to pacifists – that is a common misconception. It is awarded to those who get to peace while preparing for war, like the Latin motto says, or win wars. Cordell Hull, the American Secretary of State, awarded in 1945, was the authoritative representative of a nation that had just dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and conducted a war where no prisoner was spared. But he also fought and won a conflict that appeared undoubtedly right.

This prize – which is always even more subjective and controversial than the literature prize – makes clear that not everyone can be an apostle and martyr of non-violence like Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer or Aung Sang Suu Ky. The committee wanted to recognize Obama’s willingness to admit, politically, that the ideological choices of his predecessors were dead ends in trying to change foreign regimes. He admits this even though the legacy of those choices keeps dragging the new president into the bog where he found himself at the time of his inauguration.

Even the White House’s reaction to the news, that Obama said he received from his daughter who woke him up telling he was won the award (lovely lie for the audience, since he had already been told by Gibbs, the press agent, at 6 in the morning), brings with it a bit of novelty, of fresh air in the building of maximum power that the gloomy reign of Bush and Cheney had made suffocating. “Wow!” was his first reaction, like a teenager surprised by a big, unexpected gift. And after that, a barbecue in the evening, with steaks, sausages and hamburgers, like a picnic with family and friends.

A lack of rhetoric, of vanity, of revenge towards those who rally against him, these things are more comforting than his official answers to the media. He did, however, admit that he was not awarded because of his accomplishments, but because of the leadership role of America. Possibly an America that resembles more the Cairo speech than the insane proclamations of “new American centuries” written by neo-Trotskyites – later named neoconservatives – bent on a permanent crusade. This award is simply a call for action. In sports jargon, Obama has scored a goal, but now he must press on.