This Just In: Nobel Prize Jumps Shark

This isn't from the Onion, unless the Wall Street Journal signed on to the joke too. The Nobel Committee has awarded this year's peace prize to... wait for it... the European Union. This is interesting. Yves Smith says it best over at Naked Capitalism:

as we and others have chronicled at length, the Eurocrats seem determined to strip periphery countries of sovereignty and put not just their economies but their societies on the rack in a failing plan to save the banks of the surplus countries. In 2009, the Peace Prize Committee wanted to acknowledge and encourage Obama’s better impulses but instead bestowed the prize as his authoritarian side was coming to the fore. Now, the dark side of Europe is on full display as more and more ordinary people take to the streets to protest the fecklessness of their leaders as social structures are fracturing and old national hostilities are rising under the weight of destructive, misguided policies.

Apparently the NPP has become a carrot to get people or entities that might do evil to consider -- to consider -- doing good. This was part of the argument for the peculiar decision to give Obama the prize, and if our unremitting drone strikes and such are any indication, the gambit is paying off handsomely. The same approach seems in play here too. The WSJ reports: 

Thorbørn Jagland, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said that the organization wants to encourage Europe to back away from the "extremism and nationalism" that led to major conflict in years past. "This is, in a way, a message to Europe to secure everything we have achieved and move forward," he said while addressing a packed crowd at the Nobel Norwegian Institute in Oslo on Friday.

This goes in the category of things that shouldn't surprise me but do. The warm and fuzzies surrounding the idea of a prize for 'peace' obscure the way this prize is woven into an international community that has staked itself on a certain model of the political - which makes sense of prize awards for people like arch-imperialist Teddy Roosevelt (who, in his defense, might actually have been the most interesting man in the world) and nominations for people like Stalin (here, scroll almost all the way down the page).