The Decline of the Nobel Peace Prize

Amidst the chaos of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s humiliating defeat in the Iowa caucus a couple weeks ago, gossip escalated to news articles about Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. To put rumors to rest, as unbelievable as it may seem, it is true that he has been elected for the 2016 award. Yes, this is the same Nobel Prize granted to Alfred Nobel the inventor of dynamite, and to Marie Curie, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, some of the most peacefully proactive leaders of human history who have worked to invent new political or scientific developments which serve the greater good. And then there’s Trump: nominated for his use of “threat weapons” against Chinese, Russian and Middle Eastern terrorist forces.This is not the first controversial nomination to occur though. People putting forth nominations for some of the world’s most brutal political leaders has actually become a pattern. Adolf Hitler was nominated twice in 1939, along with Joseph Stalin twice in 1945 and 1948, Vladimir Putin in 2013 and Benito Mussolini twice in 1935. Clearly, the moral just upheld by the individual is not taken into consideration in the nominating process, defeating the exact purpose of a peace prize: to award the most important activists in humanity. How are these nominations at all legitimate?In the last will and testament of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the award, he wrote that a recipient was only worthy on the grounds of the following rubric, “The person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”Trump is not worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is obvious to some, but for others who it is not, let me explain. He has not done any work to peacefully bind nations and work in cooperation with other politicians, nonetheless ones of other countries. His tactics are in fact the opposite of that. He pledges to the American people the ultimate destruction of ISIS, physical segregation from Mexico and any opportunity to bomb threatening countries such as Syria and Russia. Trump is not promoting peace, a moral requirement embedded in the title of the award, and instead is reverting to violence and ultimate terror to assert power as a country. This goes against every single word in Nobel’s will and would be overturning the founder’s intent of the meaning of the Peace Prize, if such a title were granted to such a useless and violent politician.The flaw lies in the system of open nominating. The process for nominating an individual for the prize is quite simple. Eligible people are members of national assemblies and governments of states, members of international courts, university rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes, persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, board members of organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.This means that essentially any government member or academic of any sort can nominate someone they feel deserves the award, even as a joke. No application or explanation for their choice is required, just the name of the nominee and their background check. To me, this is alarming. The Peace Prize was founded to honor the most courageous thinkers who contribute superlative work to the furtherance of society, not to be a laughing stock for the people. Brutal dictators like Hitler, who killed thousands of innocent citizens for a nonsensical cause are seriously bad people, meant to be taken seriously. It is the obligation of the Nobel board to select the worthiest recipients, and open nomination is what allows people to mix seriously good with seriously bad, a disrespectful crime. It is in the interest of the reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize itself to collect nominations from only seriously good candidates, not extremists, violent dictators or jokes.That is why I suggest that nominations are left to the Norwegian Nobel Committee alone. They are astute scholars purposely selected to make these history-shaping decisions. The strategy of leaving the initial nominating up to the citizens is understandable because a nominee should be chosen by the interest of the people, but perhaps another approach to that goal would be more appropriate. For example, a wide range poll would receive a more accurate idea of whom citizens think is deserving of the prize than collecting individual requests from only bureaucrats with academic credentials.The Nobel Peace Prize is indeed on the decline—not in popularity, but in seriousness. A Swedish parliament member E.G.C. Brandt who nominated Hitler for the accolade said that he “never intended the nomination to be taken seriously.” In order to restore and uphold the integrity originally weighted with the name of the prize, the board must work build up a common sense rampart to screen out silly nominations and do justice to the primary honor of the award.