Questioning the credibility of the Nobel Peace Prize

When this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union, the first pundits responded by saying "well, at least it wasn't the Nobel Prize in Economics." Now a more salient criticism has been leveled at the committee, by Norwegian lawyer and Nobel historian Fredrik S. Heffermehl.

For years, Heffermehl has been writing books and penning opinion pieces in the Norwegian media arguing that the country's Nobel Committee, in charge of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize each year, is failing to follow the last will and testament of the Swedish industrialist whose fortune served as the basis for the prize.

Nobel's will states that the prize should be given to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"...

Fredrik Heffermehl: In the beginning, the Norwegian politicians, whose job it is to select the Nobel Committee, were eager to find the right peace-minded individuals working for a global peace order, which is what Nobel wanted to support.

But sometime after 1948, in the wake of the Second World War, this eagerness dissipated. Today, the Committee is very different and I would say consists of Norwegian politicians who accept a world system of competing military forces, the direct opposite of the core purpose of Nobel´s Peace Prize..

FH: The military sector in Norway was and is a strong sector and the reality today is that a majority politicians favouring a strong military defence are in control of a prize, which was initially meant for their opponents...

FH: To be honest, I feel less interested every year – the prizes have less and less to do with Nobel. The politicians are using Nobel’s name to promote their own ideas, they do not understand that Nobel saw the costly and dangerous threat to human survival that would develop if the world failed to curb militarism. His desire for a global peace order is a much more urgent, mandatory need today than when he wrote his will.

The above excerpted from The Local (Sweden's News in English), where note is also made of the fact that the previous prize was awarded to dronemaster Barack Obama.