The European Union (EU) was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I thought this was a joke at first, but I was wrong and they actually got one. I also didn’t think that the Nobel Committee could make a worse mistake than when they awarded Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize in late 2009. I was wrong again.
I don’t want to make this post too much about Obama’s prize, but it is important to briefly look at it before we discuss the EU’s prize. Realistically speaking, I thought Obama’s prize was a huge mistake to begin with, as it was for little more than big promises and dazzling rhetoric rather than actual results given that it was awarded less than a year into his first (and hopefully only) term. In other words, it was little different than Obama’s actual election and the committee, like the American people, got caught up in Obamania. Even three years later, I think the case for giving him the prize is virtually nonexistent, but this is out of scope here.
Basically, Obama was awarded the prize for promises and rhetoric, but little real action, either positive or negative. Even diehard Obama supporters agree on this. As I said above, the question of whether or not he deserves it now three years later is irrelevant here. I contend that the EU’s award is a greater lapse in judgment because, though it was also awarded given a colossal amount of promises and rhetoric (even more than Obama), it was awarded even knowing how drastically the negative action outweighs the positive action. Thus, the EU deserves it even less than Obama did. Let’s explore why this is such a huge mistake by the committee.
One need only look at the sorry state of Europe to see why this prize is not deserved. Europe has soaring unemployment, soaring debts and deficits, stagnant or negative growth, riots and poverty all through the continent (“advancement of peace and reconciliation,” indeed), and so on. It’s hard to decide which is in worse shape between Ireland and Greece, both of which are well on their ways to becoming failed states. Spain is not far behind. Portugal and Italy aren’t as far along as Spain, but are facing similar issues. Additionally, I think France is the big fiscal powder keg waiting for a spark that nobody is watching. There are movements toward secession involving various sections of Spain, Italy, and Belgium. Efforts to address these problems have all fallen short. Yes, Europe has had several consistently uncompetitive economies and dysfunctional governments like Greece, but that alone doesn’t explain why Europe is such a mess right now.
Fundamentally speaking, none of these economic and fiscal symptoms can be solved until Europe addresses the real underlying root cause of the problem, namely their flawed currency structure. The Euro, in its present form, is a failed currency. Do not let anybody tell you otherwise. In a nutshell, the problem is they sought economic and fiscal unity via a common currency without political unity, the logic being that fiscal unity would lead to political unity. That logic has proven disastrously flawed.
The only way the crisis in Europe will be solved is to fix their currency structure, which can be done in exactly one of two ways. Either Europe can become more integrated to become a United States of Europe with a stronger, centralized European-level government or they can revert to the pre-Euro state of affairs with a European Union, but each country returns to its own currency and no common currency exists. I previously compared the US and EU here.
How can you justify giving a prize to this dysfunctional collective known as the EU? Why should the EU be rewarded for making one of the greatest policy blunders of the modern era by creating the Euro?
On a side note, leave it to the Europeans to blame the US for their dysfunctional currency union. Thorbørn Jagland, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, had this to say in a supreme display of pure ignorance, arrogance, and intellectual dishonesty. Per the WSJ:
“We don't have a position on how to solve the economic crisis, but we believe it will be important to solve it and that European unity can be kept so that Europe can move forward. There are many things to say about the economic crisis—where it originated, for instance. Actually, it started in the U.S. and all of us had to deal with it."
It’s not the fault of the US that the European banks had even greater leverage than ours had. The US was not responsible for various European governments running their economies into the ground. Most importantly, the US had no role in Europe deciding to form a completely dysfunctional currency and political structure. Also, this was a nice display of blaming somebody else for your problems and offering no solutions. What a joke.
Here’s the bottom line. The committee, having done tremendous damage to its credibility by awarding Obama a prize, has done even more harm to its already-damaged credibility by awarding a prize to the EU. It should be rewarding positive results, not promising rhetoric, not performance without results, and certainly not negative results. The committee also needs to recognize that, though other parties do bear some responsibility, Europe’s present crisis is mostly a self-inflicted problem that they continue to perpetuate and exacerbate with half-hearted “solutions”.
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