NEWS ANALYSIS: US President Donald Trump, fresh from ordering bombings and a military intervention in Venezuela, has complained once again that he didn’t win last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. He blamed Norway itself on Wednesday, even though the Norwegian government has nothing to do with who the five members of the independent Norwegian Nobel Committee select as the winner.
Trump also misspelled the name of the Peace Prize established by the late Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901. Trump wrote on social media that he had “single-handedly ENDED 8 WARS, and Norway, a NATO Member, foolishly chose not to give me the Noble (cq) Peace Prize.” He added that “doesn’t matter,” but went on to claim, among other things, that he has saved “Millions of Lives.”
Trump’s new complaint against Norway can be viewed as another threat against a NATO ally from the Trump Administration, along the lines of how Trump has been claiming that the US should take over control of Greenland from Denmark. Norwegian officials are, at any rate, once again facing a need to clarify how the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded and how they’re not directly involved.
Instead it was Alfred Nobel himself who willed the fortune he’d accumulated in the 1800s to set up the Nobel prizes, and set the criteria for them. All of the prizes are awarded in Sweden except for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel himself decreed in his will that it be awarded by a committee appointed to reflect the political make-up of the Norwegian Parliament at any given time.
No one is sure why Nobel wanted the committee that would award his Peace Prize to be made up of Norwegians, or why he wanted the prize to be awarded in Oslo. Norway was still in a union with Sweden at the time and didn’t become its own independent nation until 1905.
While Alfred Nobel wanted the committee to reflect the make-up of Norway’s parliament (called Storting and currently made up of nine political parties), neither parliament nor the government has anything to do with how the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself functions. The various parties represented in Parliament nominate committee members, and they’re chosen in line how representation is weighted.
After that they have no involvement in (or authority over) who the five committee members themselves choose to short-list among the hundreds of nominations submitted, and then ultimately agree on a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after months of confidential deliberations.
Norway’s current Labour Party-led government, meanwhile, doesn’t have a majority in Parliament, after winning last year’s election with just 28.2 percent of the vote. Norway currently is ruled by a minority Labour government that must seek support from other parties on an issue-by-issue basis.
The Norwegian Parliament, however, is known for largely being in agreement on foreign policy and defense issues. Norway’s right-wing Progress Party leader Sylvi Listhaug quickly supported Labour’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre’s criticism of Trump’s intervention in Venezuela as a violation of the Rule of Law.
Norwegian Nobel Committee decisions have in fact created controversy or problems for the Norwegian government, which doesn’t know who wins the Peace Prize until it’s announced. One example is when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiabao in 2010. That set off a lengthy diplomatic freeze between China and Norway that didn’t end for another six years.
The new Nobel Laureate Machado, meanwhile, has earlier said she was dedicating her Peace Prize to Trump, and she has supported his military intervention in Venezuela. After US military forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, however, Trump said he didn’t think she had enough support to take over leadership of the country. He instead said the US would be running the country, and then supported Maduro’s vice president in taking over as president.
Maduro was asked in an interview this week with the US TV network Fox News whether she had offered to turn over her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump. She said that hadn’t happened yet, but that she would “love to personally tell him” that the Venezuelan people would want that, “to share it with him.”
That’s not at all possible, however, according to Nobel officials. Erik Aasheim, communications director at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, confirmed to newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) on Wednesday that no Nobel prize can either be called back or passed on to another person. Nobel winners can, however, do what they want with the prize money that goes along with their Nobel, currently SEK 11 million, or around USD 1 million at current exchange rates. They are also given an 18-carat fair-mined gold medal, but only their names are engraved on it.
Under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize is to be awarded to the person “who shall have done the most of the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” As the Nobel Prize’s own website states, the prize “over the course of time” has also been awarded “in recognition of many different kinds of peace work and concepts of peace.” It’s solely up to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to interpret that on an annual basis.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
