President Barroso correctly reminded us last week that a founding principle of the EU was to try and prevent war. “The European Union is something very precious”, he said in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. (I wonder, incidentally, in what sense he meant “precious”?). His reminder  was peculiar given its context. As if the prevention of war and tyranny could be ‘rewarded’ by a thing as flippant as a ‘prize for peace’. Prize for peace? It sounds like a badge a toddler might get for not whingeing in church. Why has it not been said more often, when distinguished people like Tawakkol Karman were awarded the prize, that their work cannot be rewarded as such? Labelling their achievements as ‘prize-worthy’ actually diminishes them. Are we to turn the sphere of justice and peace into a kind of film awards ceremony? Considering that the Nobel awarding committee in Sweden ludicrously calls itself an Academy, I suppose we are one step away from renaming the Peace Prize ‘the Academy Award for Best Peacemaker’. Perhaps they’ll introduce more categories. I wonder how we would define ‘Best Supporting Peacemaker’.

As if the concept of the Peace Prize weren’t flimsy enough as it is, it has been hopelessly discredited by the decisions of previous awarding committees. It is true that the 124-long list of Peace Prize laureates throws up the names of some great warriors: Mandela, King, Xiaobo and Tutu to name but a few. These were great people (not because of their laureateship but, arguably, in spite of the fact). Alongside them, however, are the names of many who either did not deserve any worldly award at all (let alone a million dollar cash prize) or, more worryingly, were given the Prize in spite of their propensity, say, to bomb cities whose names they struggled to pronounce. Barack Obama – through no fault of his own – was undeservingly awarded the prize in 2009. Of course he was at fault in gladly accepting it: he should have instantly declined, citing his unworthiness – at that point in his presidency – to be in the same league as Martin Luther King and Lech Walesa. Christopher Hitchens called the decision to award the prize to Obama a ‘virtual award […] rather like giving out an Oscar to an actor in the hope of him making a good film in the future’.

Justifying their decision, the committee cited the worldwide ‘dialogue’ the Obama administration has opened up thanks to the President’s ‘efforts…towards strengthening international diplomacy’ and ‘promotion of nuclear nonproliferation’ (my emphasis). It was an award for what could be as opposed to ‘what has been achieved. At this point I should point out an obvious paradox: how can one say that the Peace Prize is pointless, contemptible and worthless and still judge someone as an ‘undeserving winner’? The question is whether the Peace Prize is pointless, contemptible and worthless because of the people who have won it in the past, or whether it’s an inherently futile and damaging exercise to hand out prizes for peace. In my view both these criticisms can co-exist despite their paradox.

The most absurd episodes in the Prize’s history have been when the awarding committee has given the gong, as it were, to people whose time was spent ruining the lives of others. Mother Theresa was made laureate in 1979. She lived her life preaching fatalism to the poor, describing poverty as something to be accepted –even embraced. She built ‘Missionaries of Charity’ in which orphans and homeless people were involuntarily baptized into the Roman Catholic Church and then left to die without proper medical attention. The Albanian was, of course, spared these kinds of indignities: she met her end in an expensive Kolkata clinic. Whilst professing her love for the poor, she happily accepted money from the corrupt and murderous Duvalier regime in Haiti – a regime that later awarded her the highest civilian honour, the Legion d’Honneur. She was a crusader for the Catholic right. Nowhere is this more evident than in her Nobel lecture, at the height of the nuclear arms race, when she said that the ‘greatest threats to world peace’ were abortion and artificial contraception. She had, until that point in her life, said nothing of significance or intelligence on the subject of peace or human rights or justice.

When Henry Kissinger won in 1973, the cartoonist Tom Lehrer said that ‘satire had died’. Lehrer’s comment still remains the greatest thing that’s ever been said about one of the most offensive decisions in the Prize’s history. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the Nobel Academy was named after the creator of that most peace loving of inventions: dynamite.

Barroso would do well to hand back the award – or at least to put on a show of firm indifference to it. Setting aside the futility of handing out a prize for peace, the Academy has not made a total stinker in 2012. The EU is, at least, well intentioned, and has an admirable record fighting for the breathing space of peace and justice. What, however, is the Academy (perhaps unwittingly) saying about the EU by nominating it as the 2012 laureate? Is it a confederation of 500 million people, as its name suggests? Or is it, rather, an organization in Brussels with Barroso as its head? If the former, then presumably anyone who currently is in possession of an EU passport is entitled to their $500 share of the million dollar prize money.