This year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the 27-nation European Union as an entity is not without irony. The euro zone, which comprises 17 of these countries, is in financial turmoil. As the single currency that sought to bind the countries that are the mainstay of what goes under the rubric of Western Europe in political terms, the euro faces a life-threatening crisis.
Harsh austerity measures in the financial sector have been imposed on Greece and Spain, especially by Germany. But the backlash has been strong, especially on the streets of Athens where demonstrators fought back police earlier this week when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited.
Seen in these terms, honouring the EU provokes the same scepticism as greeted the award to President Barack Obama in 2009 when he was prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, if we contemplate the broad sweep of history, the Nobel committee that decided on the EU may have a point. The formation of the EU (and its predecessor the EEC in the aftermath of World War II) brought together France and Germany, thus minimising chances of war in Europe which had been ravaged by fighting for the preceding 70 years. If the Balkans in the 1990s became the exception, this was possibly on account of the after-shock of the Cold War. The Nobel award is clearly also a message to Europe not to give up on the euro whose end is likely to ease narrow nationalism back in.