AL GORE can't stop winning. Less than a year after accepting an Oscar for his film about the imminent threat of global warming, the former vice president picked up a Nobel Peace Prize last week for his efforts to raise public awareness of the same issue. Seven years after his disheartening loss in the 2000 presidential election, Gore has found his consolation prize in the adoration of Hollywood, the Nobel Committee and the innumerable Americans who want him to run again.
I like Gore and I've got nothing but respect for his tireless devotion to environmental issues. Gore was urging action on global warming long before most Americans had heard the term "global warming" and he stuck with it even when he and his cause were unpopular. But it was nonetheless disappointing to see Gore win the Nobel, for it marks the second time in the past five years that the Peace Prize was used as an arguable, if not obvious, rebuke to the Bush administration.
The first time was in 2002 when the prize was awarded to Jimmy Carter, according to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, for "his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts." The prize was deserved, but the Nobel Committee made clear that the former president did not win for his works alone. With the Bush administration gearing up for war in Iraq, the chairman of the Committee announced that the award "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken." The Committee was more restrained this time around, with its chairman stating last week that Gore's prize was not meant as a "kick in the leg to anyone." But the timing of the award, and the fact that global warming has only an indirect connection to world peace, suggest otherwise.
The award came on the heels of a United Nations summit on climate change from which the United States was conspicuously absent, having organized its own competing meeting in Washington. And though global warming has a global security dimension, given the possibility that climate change will unleash natural disasters, mass migrations and resource wars that can only be guessed at today, the only proximate connection between global warming and world peace is that people who are interested in one tend also to be interested in the other. Whatever the merits of Gore's work, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that, like his Academy Award, the Peace Prize was a move to put Gore on a pedestal while shaming his conservative detractors.
The Nobel Committee has occasionally awarded the Peace Prize to those who fight poverty, oppression and now, environmental degradation, as opposed to those who work directly to end armed conflict. But increasingly, the Committee awards the Peace Prize to causes rather than people, and does so in a fairly transparent effort to bless liberal movements such as environmentalism while condemning conservative leaders such as George W. Bush. It might be argued that such is exactly what the Nobel Committee should be doing, but the Peace Prize loses something when it's used merely to spotlight international issues, however important they may be.
The best use of a peace prize is to recognize people who take big risks and make big sacrifices to resolve conflicts, promote justice and bring down oppressive regimes. People like Yitzhak Rabin and Anwar Sadat, who sought to end the Israeli-Arab conflict and eventually paid with their lives. People like Martin Luther King, who sought civil rights by peaceful means when others, on both sides, resorted to violence. People like Lech Walesa, who stood boldly against communist oppression, and people like Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who let communism crumble rather than sustain it by force. To break old patterns of violence and achieve worthy ends by worthy means is rare in history, and a peace prize should confer international acclaim on those who have the courage to do so.
The problem with Gore's award is that it has no grounding in the sort of courage and self sacrifice shown by many past winners, nor even in the mundane efforts to promote world peace that have earned others the prize. Rather, Gore's award springs simply from the notion that global warming is bad and that raising public awareness of it is good. Such is surely true, but it seems rather far removed from the mission of a peace prize to recognize such efforts. The same might be said of last year's Peace Prize, which went to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi professor who developed microcredit as a means of encouraging economic development in poor countries.
It is, perhaps, a happy sign of our times that the Peace Prize is now awarded to international do-gooders rather than to statesmen and revolutionaries, for it suggests that the era of large-scale war is over and that the cause of "peace" can now be advanced by private citizens pursuing a wide variety of schemes for improving humanity. But the Nobel Committee cannot become cheerleaders for causes having scant connection to world peace without sacrificing the moral authority that makes their prize a useful instrument for peace. Al Gore may be right about global warming, but a Nobel Peace Prize should cost you more than that.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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