Nobel Prize or Hollywood Oscar?

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has given rise to a concert of almost unanimous praise. Its only victim is the cause of peace.

Certainly, in the long term, controlling climate change is likely to promote the harmonious development of mankind. From that point of view, however, the winners of prizes in medicine, physics or economics were equally deserving. Especially since it is not certain that the means to be used to force recalcitrant countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, wastage of water and raw materials will promote peaceful relations between human communities. It is, in fact, extremely doubtful.

Science is one thing, peace another. That is clear from Alfred Nobel’s own life. Scientific discoveries are morally neutral – they can serve the cause either of peace or war. And that is why there is a Nobel Peace Prize distinct from the scientific and literary prizes.

Unfortunately, however, compared with the risks of climate change, in the short term war remains a far greater evil in the early 21st century, a far greater threat to the future and one that is in fact entirely man-made. In one form or another, it spares no continent. From Afghanistan to Darfur, from Colombia to Somalia, from Iraq to Sri Lanka, it has cast a tragic shadow over dozens of countries and 90% of its victims are civilians. Thirteen years ago, the Rwandan genocide rightly shocked world opinion, but since then, the Congolese civil war that spread to all the neighbouring countries and killed five million people has met with indifference in the media. The threat of nuclear war, which people thought had disappeared with the end of the Cold War, has resurfaced in North Korea, in Iran, with the American anti-missile shield project, with China’s anti-satellite experiments; and even traditionally peaceful countries such as Brazil are thinking of acquiring nuclear submarines. Faced with this kind of world, at a time like this, is there really any urgent reason to stop defending the cause of peace?

This episode should make the Nobel Committee think twice about what it does. When you look at the list of Nobel Peace Prizes awarded from the beginning, and even in recent times, you are struck by the number of names that have remained unknown, or were obviously chosen for reasons of immediate political convenience. Real peace-makers are, alas, the exception in the list. To take only two examples: how come none of the founding fathers of European integration, let alone a single EU institution, has ever been awarded the prize, even though the Union is certainly one of the most extraordinary achievements of peace in the entire history of mankind? More recently, how could the Scandinavian jury ignore the men and institutions that put an end to the civil war in the Congo?

This business also gives rise to a very obvious suggestion: why not create a Nobel Prize for ecology? Back in 2004, Wangari Maathai from Kenya was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work as an environmental campaigner. It would have been quite legitimate to award that prize to those who promoted the Kyoto Protocol, to the pioneers in biofuels, to those who did research on carbon capture and clean cars, or to the IPCC for its activities. And they would have been more entitled to it than a loud-talking man like Al Gore, whose spectacular film contains basic scientific errors, as Alain Duhamel recently pointed out.

Let us, therefore, reward on the basis of merit: Hollywood films with media-friendly Oscars, scientific work with prestigious international recognition, and men of peace as the rarest and most deserving benefactors of mankind.

Alain Lamassoure, 16 October 2007.