Why do we care so much about the Nobel Prize?
David Kenner Steven A. Cook Kristaps Andrejsons Mina Al-Oraibi Eugene Chausovsky Bart M. J. Szewczyk Changwook Ju Joshua Byun
Mario Tama/Getty ImagesWithout taking anything away from former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his work as an…
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Foreign Policy
Without taking anything away from former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his work as an “outstanding international mediator” in conflicts from Indonesia to Northern Ireland, the entire institution of the Nobel Committee has grown so self-important that this is a worthwhile opportunity to question its judgment and ultimately its usefulness.

The 1973 Peace Prize, awarded to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho for their role in the Paris Peace Accords, remains a head-scratcher. Kissinger played a major role in expanding the U.S. bombing campaign across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, while Tho’s government would soon violate the Accords by launching a military invasion of South Vietnam that culminated in the 1975 fall of Saigon.

The Nobel Prize in Literature also has been guilty of sins of omission. Many of the last century’s most celebrated writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Mario Vargas Llosa and Philip Roth, have been ignored by the Committee. Greene and Nabokov were considered in 1974, but eventually lost out to Swedes Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson — who just happened to be Nobel judges themselves.

The Literature Prize is awarded by a committee selected by the Academy, founded by the Swedish King Gustav III in 1786, while the Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. In any other context, the idiosyncratic tastes and political beliefs of these elite Scandinavians don’t exactly make headlines. Why the entire world pauses to honor the selections of an otherwise unknown group of people remains a mystery.

In the end, the Nobel Prize reveals more about society’s collective obsession with honorifics than it does about the world’s great leaders and writers.