What the Nobel committee is trying to tell America
Surprised that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? So was Barack Obama. But like the decision to put the Olympics in Rio, there is nothing mystifying about it to people outside America, and the message to us is clear if we will listen for it.
Rio was a surprise only because Americans persuaded themselves that the pitches for Chicago by the president and Oprah were somehow unusual and special, even though every city in the running was represented by a head of government, except Madrid, which was represented by King Juan Carlos of Spain. In the end, the Olympic Committee understandably decided that it was time the games were held someplace in South America.
As for the peace prize, Americans, including their president, have been focused on domestic issues like health care, and when we do focus on the world we tend to think in terms of containing regional troublemakers through the exertion of American power, while people in the rest of the world see America as, sometimes, the biggest troublemaker of all, largely through its long history of using force where negotiation would do.
But to fully understand this, you first need to understand the Naguib Mahfouz Factor.
Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian author of 50 novels. He won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1988. I remember this because it was second or third year that the committee had gone for someone who didn't write in English and was pretty much unknown in America. The Russian Joseph Brodsky had won the year before and a Nigerian author the year before that. The Nobel committee was bent on honoring people we never heard of.
In the newsroom we made fun of this. We made an awful, irreverant list in the newsroom of his "books" that included "Naked Came the Terrorist," "Moby Sheik," "To Kill a Jew," and "A Tale of Two Camels." We were all young and thought this was a hoot. But we also did some research on the guy, and found he was being threatened by extremists for his support of the Camp David accords. I only learned while researching this post that the extremists got to him eventually, stabbing him in the neck and hand, leaving him unable to write without great pain. Mahfouz died in 2006.
The point is that the Nobel committee awarded him the prize, not just because some of them had read and liked his novels, but because they wanted to use the prize to call world attention to deserving authors, something more useful to Egyptian, Russian and Nigerian writers than to Americans, and also because they wanted to make a statement of support for a guy who was a force for good in a troubled region. Mahfouz returned the favor a year later when he said those who threatened Salman Rushdie were terrorists. Mahfouz wound up stabbed in the neck but Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" is hilarious but arguably sacrilegious, is alive and well and writing at the age of 62.
So are we clear on this? The Nobel committee does not merely form an opinion on who's best at something or who has done the most. Its choices are gestures, meant to encourage what the judges feel should be encouraged. Which brings us back to Barack Obama.
For several administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, it has been U.S. policy to snub regional troublemakers, as if access to top U.S. officials is a privilege so wonderful that we must dole it out carefully as a reward for good behavior. President Obama has taken a different course, showing a willingness to engage afresh with a lot of people who haven't exactly been pulling their weight on world peace.
This simple change has not gotten a great deal of notice in the United States. The president himself seems to regard it as no big deal, merely something he thinks it's worth the effort to try, in case it works. Even the president's most intractable critics have barely mentioned it, considering other things more important to argue about.
But in the rest of the world, this is a big deal. We may feel we were only snubbing a couple of guys – North Korea's Kim, Libya's Ghaddafi, Iran's Ahmadinejad – who are neither major world figures nor particularly respectable. But from outside the United States, where everybody feels like a little guy compared to America the last world power, a fresh willingness to engage, even occasionally to consult, seems like a real good idea.
President Obama is right to suggest that the peace prize is not really meant for him. I don't think it is, either. I think it's meant for America, as encouragement to stick with this new business of being willing to talk to other world leaders.
And if you still bristle at a president winning the Nobel Prize less than a year into office, I think you're taking the prize too seriously. George Bernard Shaw, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, said he could forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite but not for inventing his prize.
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