Al Gore and the Peaceful Voice of Norwegian Foreign Policy

By Tracy Dove, Ph.D
Editor, The Russia News Service

October 12, 2007

It is good news for the environment, and it is better news for the likes of YouTube. Former Vice President Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on proving that global warming is a reality. While this did not come as a surprise once the short list was announced, it is certainly one more nugget of fool's gold in the supposedly objective pockets of the Nobel Committee. Including Mr. Gore, there are a total of 4 American Presidents and Vice-Presidents who have received the award, and for each one there is a bed of evidence that their winning was politically motivated. Whether this is bad news for Hillary Clinton remains to be seen, but one thing is sure: the little country of Norway has a lot more influence in international politics than appears on the surface.

It must first be said that the great decisions regarding whom to award the prestigious prize to are not made in heaven but by very tertiary Norwegians, and their political affiliation has everything to do with who holds the reigns in Oslo. Just who sits on the Nobel Committee is established by the Norwegian Parliament, and since Norwegian politics has been quite fragmented recently it is safe to say that the multi-party committee that voted for Gore came from a broad political spectrum. And this is good news for environmentalists: it was just last year that the environment was added to the list of possible avenues to world peace, so the plate was still warm- so to speak- when global warming got its first real break with the film An Inconvenient Truth. This has more to do with Norway than meets the eye; there are many studies out now that argue if temperatures in the North Atlantic go much higher, then the Gulf Stream will slow down, resulting in a colder Norway than there is now. With a long coastline, this Scandinavian country is very interested in getting global warming back in the White House.

Without taking the wind out of the former Vice-President's sails, it can be fairly said that most of the American executives who won the Nobel Prize have won it for reasons that can be traced back to Norwegian politics. The first American president to win the prize was Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 for his work in ending the Russo-Japanese war of the year before. While this might count as a noble cause among any international board, it was a major concern of the Norwegian government at the time. Let's not forget that Alfred Nobel was Swedish, but he gave the right of awarding the peace prize with all its money to the Norwegians. He never explained why he did this, but when Norway finally broke with Sweden and became its own country- coincidentally in 1905- the irony was not lost on most critics of the day. Many historians blame national paranoia in Norway and the country's frenzy to be recognized by the United States as the ulterior motive for electing Roosevelt, since this President was also the one who fanned the flames of war in the Spanish-American War of 1898, thus making him an unsuited candidate for the prize.

The next American to win was Woodrow Wilson in 1920- the same President whose famous 14 Points brought into existence the League of Nations but whose slogan "peace without victory" was ignored in drafting the peace for defeated Germany. It seems that Wilson had already been tagged back in 1918 for the prize, but the committee decided not to award one for that wretched year of war, and so Wilson's candidacy was shelved. In 1919, he was back on again for his 14 Points, which French Prime Minister Clemenceau did not particularly care for, commenting dryly upon their rigidity that "God brought only 10" commandments for human beings to follow. It was true, Wilson's future envisioned no revenge, but that was far from the European victors' minds at the time: the Versailles Treaty was forced upon Germany despite Wilson's objections, and historians agree that the result of this horrible peace was another world war 20 years later. Wilson was awarded the prize just the same, since to discredit him would doom the League of Nations, although we know now that there were many on the Nobel committee who objected to Wilson's win in 1920.

Lastly we arrive at President Jimmy Carter, while carefully jumping over Henry Kissinger, whose 1973 Nobel will not be discussed here, although it was a highly hypocritical gesture at a very low point in Nobel history. Carter was awarded the prize in 2002- but not for what he did in 2002. Instead, the official line was that the former President had dedicated "decades" to pursuing peace and humanitarian efforts, and so he received this prestigious award at a time when Norway had a specific political agenda. It was in preparation for George Bush's ambush of Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2002 that the objective Nobel Committee decided to award the prize to a democrat- and to a vocal opponent of the second Gulf War.

Now, in 2007, a second democrat has received the award during the tenure of republican George Bush. The timing is both revealing and disenchanting to those who believe that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded solely on the basis of disinterested peaceful pursuits. This is not the case, and with Gore's winning of the prize we might accept with a careful nod that peace prizes are not so much a call to action but a subtle policy tool of the peaceful and objective Norwegians to whom Alfred Nobel left all that money and prestige to hand it out as they saw fit.

Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and Dean of Summer Programs for the Lessing Institute. He also teaches history at the Anglo-American College in Prague.

See all previous articles by Tracy Dove here.