OSLO - The European Union will receive the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize
at a ceremony in Oslo on Monday, honored by the Norwegian committee for
bringing decades of peace and democracy to Europe after the horrors and
division of two world wars.
Looking beyond the
current, deep malaise Europe finds itself in with slumping growth,
soaring unemployment and countries unable to pay their debts, the Nobel
committee has instead focused on what the EU has done over the past 60
years to reconcile the disparate, warring corners of the 'old
continent'.
From just six countries who agreed
to pool their coal and steel production in the 1950s to 27 member states
today—and 28 once Croatia joins next year—the EU now stretches from
Portugal to Romania, Finland to Maltaand sets rules and regulations that
have a bearing on more than 500 million people.
"The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of
Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace," the Nobel
committee said on Oct. 12 when it announced the EU had won, an
unexpected decision.
"The division between East
and West has to a large extent been brought to an end; democracy has
been strengthened; many ethnically based national conflicts have been
settled."
Moments after being announced as the
winner, the EU and its institutions were at odds over who should receive
the prize and who the Nobel trustees were specifically honoring.
In the end it was decided that the award was for all Europeans, but it
will be picked up by the heads of the EU's three main institutions.
They are Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council of
leaders of member countries, Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the EU's
executive European Commission, and Martin Schulz, president of the
elected European Parliament.
Four young
Europeans, including a 12-year-old Spanish girl and a 21-year-old woman
from Poland, will also attend the ceremony after winning competitions,
and 20 EU heads of state and government have also flown in for the
high-profile occasion.
The prize money of
930,000 euros ($1.25 million) will be given to projects that help
children struggling in war zones, with the recipients to be announced
next week. The EU has said it will match the prize money, so that a
total of 2 million euros will be given to the selected aid projects.
That decision went some way to silence critics on Twitter and other
social media sites who initially joked that if the award was for all
Europeans then they should all share the prize money—which would equal
about 0.2 euro cents each.
Commentators on
social media haven't been the only critics of the award going to the EU,
which for the past three years has been a virtual byword for disorder
and indecision because of its failure to get on top of a sovereign debt
crisis.
Former Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu said
last week that the EU did not deserve the award, and on Sunday around
1,000 members of left-wing and human-rights groups marched through the
streets of Oslo in protest, saying the EU was not a rightful beneficiary
under the terms Alfred Nobel laid down in his will in 1895.
"Alfred Nobel said that the prize should be given to those who worked
for disarmament," said Elsa-Britt Enger, 70, a representative of
Grandmothers for Peace. "The EU doesn't do that. It is one of the
biggest weapons producers in the world."
For
many people inside and outside of Europe, it is hard to get beyond the
sense of the EU as an organisation stumbling from one crisis to another
while meddling in member states' sovereignty.
In
their acceptance speech on Monday, Van Rompuy and Barroso will be
hoping to overturn those impressions by invoking the despair and misery
produced by World War Two and emphasising what Europe and its
institutions have done in the decades since to prevent trading partners
going to war with each other.
"This Nobel prize
is a recognition of our union's achievements as a peacemaker and a
tribute to the work of generations of Europeans," Van Rompuy said in a
statement. —Reuters
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