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Why
a Norwegian Nobel Committee?
A Committee
of Five | A Political Prize
| The Independence of the Committee
| From Nomination to Ceremony & Nominators
and Campaigns | Professional Advisers
| The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided...
Alfred Nobel himself never told anybody why he didn't give a Swedish
body the task of awarding the Peace Prize. Consequently we can only
speculate what, in 1895, made the cosmopolitan Swede decide to give
the task of selecting the peace prize committee to the Norwegian
Parliament. There have been a number of suggestions: Nobel admired
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the Norwegian patriot and leading author;
the Storting was the first national legislature to vote support
for the international peace movement; Nobel may have wanted to distribute
the tasks related to the Nobel Prizes within the Swedish-Norwegian
union. Nobel may also have feared that the highly political nature
of the Peace Prize would make it a tool in power politics and thereby
reduce its significance as an instrument for peace. A prize committee
selected by a rather progressive parliament from a small nation
on the periphery of Europe, without its own foreign policy and with
only a very distant past as autonomous military power, may perhaps
have been expected to be more innocent in matters of power politics
than would a committee from the most powerful of the Scandinavian
countries, Sweden. In his will Nobel wrote: «It is my express
wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the
nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive
the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not." During the 20th century
eight Scandinavians have become Peace Prize laureates. There have
been five Swedes and one Dane; only two Norwegian nationals, Christian
L. Lange and Fridtjof Nansen, have received the Prize. The geographical
distribution of laureates would appear to reveal little or no Norwegian
or Scandinavian chauvinism; on this point the Norwegian Nobel Committee
may be said to have observed the provisions in Nobel's will. However,
the number of Norwegians on the list of laureates is not necessarily
a good indicator of the influence of national considerations on
committee decisions. From a Norwegian point of view, goodwill from
other nations might, especially at the beginning of the century,
have been more valuable than having a large number of Norwegian
laureates.
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