Betraying the Nobel, Unni Turrettini

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and became very wealthy, but he had no immediate family to leave his money on his death. After some minor bequests, he used the bulk of his estate to establish the various prizes that today bear his name: Peace, medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The Swedish Central Bank created an economics prize in Nobel's honor in 1968, but it's not part of Nobel's direct legacy. From the beginning, the Nobel Peace Prize was set apart from the others though the method that Nobel designated for evaluating it and the prize committee designated to approve the award.

As Norwegian journalist Unni Turrettini outlines in her 2020 book Betraying the Nobel, the science prizes are chosen by the Swedish Academy of Science. The medicine prize is chosen by a committee that's advised by a Swedish medical university. The peace prize is chosen by a committee that's selected by the Norwegian Parliament. It has specific criteria spelled out in the will: The awardee will have done the most or best work in developing ties between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

And according to those criteria, Turrettini says, it's unlikely that more than a handful of the awardees over the Nobel Peace Prize's history would have received it had Alfred Nobel reviewed their qualifications. She reviews several, well-known and recent as well as lesser-known from earlier in the prize's history, who did none of those things. Why did they win the prize? Because for one reason or another the prize committee members felt those people made the right political statements or best served Norway's national interest. She points out that most of the committee members have been former members of the Norwegian parliament and still have Norway's interests uppermost in their minds.

It's not as though the people who received the award deserved no recognition for great efforts in advancing civil rights or some other humanitarian cause, Turrettini says. It's just that they didn't do anything to reduce standing armies or promote peace congresses, and their impact on international relations is anything from ambivalent to problematic. And some of them, following their recognition, wound up escalating conflicts around the world rather than reducing them.

In sketching Nobel's biography and some of the relevant Norwegian-Swedish history of the time, Turrettini offers a reasonable explanation of his choices, both to create such a prize and the potentially corruptible method of evaluating who should get it. She shows why Alfred Nobel did what he did, and how quickly and completely his intentions were put in the background.

Turrettini writes in a straightforward, unadorned style that doesn't ever veer into actual dryness. She makes her case quite clearly that the Peace Prize Committee has only rarely selected someone who meets the spelled-out criteria for the award. She may or may not intend to, but she also makes the case that Nobel's listed criteria would have been hopelessly limiting. The number of nations that have actually abolished standing armies is small, and reductions may happen through defeat rather than by choice. Peace congresses were heavily emphasized in the 19th century as ways for nations to develop peaceful ways to resolve disputes, but they are no longer common. The science and medicine prizes can always advance as their fields do, but history, national ambition and political gamesmanship have made sure that the best-known legacy of Alfred Nobel will usually least match his stated intentions.